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A Book Critic at the Ballet

By Dwight Garner July 14, 2011 4:00 pmJuly 14, 2011 4:00 pm

Natasha RazinaYuri Smekalov as Count Vronsky and Ulyana Lopatkina as Anna Karenina in the Mariinsky Ballet’s production of “Anna Karenina.”

A few years ago, The Guardian had the witty idea to ask its sports writers and cultural critics to swap jobs for a day. The results were delightful. An observation from the newspaper’s rugby columnist, Thomas Castalgnede, sent to review a production of “Tosca” at the Royal Opera House, has stuck with me. “What I saw in ‘Tosca’ was exactly what drew me to sport,” he wrote. “I just love to watch people give it everything — in any walk of life.”

I’m a book critic, and not a complete idiot about dance. (I saw a Christopher Wheeldon ballet at the David H. Koch a few months ago that made me, and my 12-year-old daughter, weep with pleasure.) But about classical dance I am comprehensively uneducated. Asked by The Times to attend one of the first United States performances of Alexei Ratmansky’s “Anna Karenina,” by Russia’s Mariinsky Ballet — formerly known as the Kirov Ballet — I agreed, with nagging reservations. Brilliant works of interior art like Tolstoy’s novel tend to suffer terribly in the hands of those who would interpret them in other mediums. My colleague Alastair Macaulay’s mighty — ­and mightily entertaining — put-down of this production in Wednesday’s Times did not make me more eager to go.

The Mariinsky’s production does, however, throw some complicating light on Tolstoy’s novel, and makes you turn it over freshly in your mind. The ballet, in its first half, gives off the air of a costume drama, of second-rate “Masterpiece Theater.” It’s stiff and proper and wan, filled with the pomp and broad gestures of early silent films. Tolstoy’s language can have a similarly chafing effect on readers coming to it for the first time; it takes time to synch with his rhythms.

The first line of Tolstoy’s novel — it has become such a cliché (if not an outright emetic) that, when I was an editor at the Times Book Review,
references to it in that publication were essentially banned –­ of course declares: “All happy families are alike, but an unhappy family is unhappy
after its own fashion.” All the memorable moments in the Mariinsky’s “Anna Karenina” dilate upon desolation and conjure a brewing sense of doom, a feeling underscored by the frequently beautiful set design (think snow, think lonely trains, think Edward Hopper by way of St. Petersburg).

The ballet, for me, unfurled like a black rose in its second half. As Dan Savage would put it: It gets better. Two dances in particular — an icy one between Anna and her increasingly estranged husband, and one featuring the now-socially scorned Anna, the moral adultress, alone in a red dress — drilled me to my chair. Ulyana Lopatkina, who danced the role of Anna in the performance I saw, gave a sense of what Tolstoy called the character’s “wonderful depth of feeling.”

Vladimir Nabokov was right when he called Tolstoy’s prose “so tiger bright, so original and universal that it easily transcends the sermon.” The
Mariinsky Ballet’s “Anna Karenina” is definitely not, as Mr. Macaulay pointed out, something you would call tiger bright. But those trains,
that snow, the flash of both Anna’s eyes and her red dress, these things I put in my readerly pocket like small valuable coins.